Yearly Archives: 2015

This article originally appeared at the Weekly Standard. Click here to read the full article. By Ike Brannon Last week the White House released a first draft for what it ultimately intends to be a report card for the nation’s colleges. And there’s no way this effort will improve the lot of the typical college […]

This article originally appeared in The Weekly Standard. Click here to read the full article. By Ike Brannon President Obama may be walking into a trap of his own side’s devising as he departs for the latest climate action summit in Paris. If Republicans can suppress their innate ability to snatch defeat from the jaws[…..]

This article originally appeared at the Weekly Standard. Click here to read the full article. By Ike Brannon In 2005, the King-Drew Medical Center in Los Angeles, which served primarily low-income African American and Latino patients, closed its trauma unit. In 2001, D.C. General Hospital, the only public medical facility in the nation’s capital, closed[…..]

This article originally appeared at The Weekly Standard. Click here to read the full article. By Ike Brannon The answer is climate change—at least if the question is “why should we keep a costly and ineffective government agency.” The Obama Administration’s recent repurposing of a heretofore moribund government agency as a tool to soften the[…..]

This article originally appeared in the Manhattan Institute. Click here to read the full article. By Bryan Weaver and Ike Brannon Last winter, a full week after the final snowstorm of the season, most of the cars parked on our block, in the Adams-Morgan neighborhood of Washington, D.C., sat untouched. It wasn’t the snow that[…..]

This article originally appeared at The Hill. Click here to read the full story. By Ike Brannon The government monopoly on money is a relatively recent phenomenon. Until the creation of the Federal Reserve just over 100 years ago, private banks could issue notes backed by gold that functioned akin to money. The era of[…..]

This article originally appeared at Real Clear Markets. Click here to read the full article. By Ike Brannon The New York Times recently wrote about Amazon’s recent expansion into the realm of services by creating various local marketplaces for its customers to find plumbers or handymen to do a variety of services that the retailer[…..]

This article originally appeared at the Federalist. Click here to read the full story. By Ike Brannon I should start this essay by proudly announcing that one of my parents has no college degree and the other was abandoned by his parents as a toddler. Neither fact has proven to be the least bit relevant[…..]

This article originally appeared in Regulation. Click here to read the full article. By Ike Brannon Is Peoria, Ill., special? Of course it is, says I—along with the thousands of other people who, like me, hail from the central Illinois community. It’s a great city with wonderful people, as well as a rich culture and[…..]

This article originally appeared in the Journal Star. Click here to read the full article. By Ike Brannon The battle in Peoria over whether — or how — to allow food trucks has two, well-delineated sides. Proponents celebrate the greater variety of food options they would bring to downtown diners, while the established restaurants argue[…..]

This article originally appeared at WPRI. Click here to read the full article. By Ike Brannon A productive dialog about poverty in America must recognize the need for transparency about policies aimed at addressing the issue. Milwaukee’s Public Policy Institute seems to do the opposite by appealing to the conclusions of a “sophisticated microeconometric model”[…..]

This article originally appeared at The Hill. Click here to read the full story. By Ike Brannon Drug costs represent a large and growing share of health care costs and for good reason: Developing a new drug and proving it safe and effective is more expensive than ever before, and the cutting-edge drugs of late[…..]

This article originally appeared in Regulation. Click here to read the full article. By Sam Batkins and Ike Brannon In these pages four years ago (“Obfuscation at the EPA,” Summer 2011) we announced our discovery of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s new methodology for ascribing job gains to costly new regulations: a sleight-of-hand whereby it[…..]

This article originally appeared at the Weekly Standard. Click here to read the full story. By Ike Brannon New York governor Andrew Cuomo, not content with President Obama’s proposal to make junior colleges free, recently introduced his own plan for New York to essentially waive the first two years of student debt payments for college[…..]

This article originally appeared in the Weekly Standard. Click here to read the full article. By Ike Brannon Last week the president feigned striking a blow for lower college costs with his proposal to make junior colleges free for all attendees meeting minimal academic standards. True to form, the president has taken on something not[…..]

This article originally appeared at the Weekly Standard. Click here to read the full story. By Ike Brannon Republicans have been tripping over one another to slag President Obama’s tax proposal, made in his State of the Union address, to repeal the step-up in basis on inherited wealth and use the revenue it would generate[…..]

This article originally appeared at the Weekly Standard. Click here to read the full story. By Ike Brannon Ever since the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, proponents of robust economic growth and sensible regulation have been trying to rein it in. The legislation that created the Bureau – which was a[…..]

This article originally appeared at the Weekly Standard. Click here to read the full story. By Ike Brannon Even in the giddy afterglow of the new Congress, when all things seem possible, few Republicans seriously think that the Affordable Care Act will be repealed in 2015. More realistically, various politicians have averred that a Republican[…..]

This article originally appeared in The American. Click here to read the full article. By Ike Brannon What will Republicans do with both houses of Congress in 2015? Republicans — and a few Democrats — have expressed interest in taking a new look at the Dodd-Frank Act, the landmark 2010 legislation that completely altered the[…..]